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In those seven years her English got better, her Russian got practice, and her native German was spoken almost exclusively to two boyfriends who were both in love with her and were roommates down the hall. It took almost three years of knowing them before she decided to have sex with one of them, and when she saw how this affected the other, she had sex with him too. Then she stopped having sex with both of them because it seemed to hurt them, but they continued to court her, perhaps waiting for her to make another decision and start the cycle again. They remained roommates. But Utch decided that it was impossible for her - at least at that age - to make love to more than one person at a time, and she found a third young man, altogether outside the old friendship (he was an understudy for a great tenor in the Vienna Opera Company), and made love to him for a while. When her two old boyfriends discovered her new affair, they waylaid the tenor-understudy one evening in the maze of scaffolding supporting St Stephen's Cathedral and told him they'd tear out his vocal chords if he saw any more of her without proposing marriage to her. This may seem quaint, but Utch didn't find fault with her old boyfriends' adolescent behavior. They were hurt, and they were going to hurt the tenor-understudy if he didn't pay for something. Utch always felt that there was no reason for any kind of hurting that anyone could stop, so she told the tenor-understudy that he'd better propose to her if he wanted to see her again. He changed opera companies instead, which she thought was a perfectly decent way of not hurting anybody, and she warmly declined the renewed, invigorated courtship from her old boyfriends. 'No, Willy, nein, Heinrich,' she told them. 'Someone would get hurt.'
Severin, whose perceptions often ran parallel to Utch's, surprised us one evening when we were all trying to talk about what our relationship meant to us. At least Edith and I were trying; Utch rarely said much about it and Severin had just been listening in his irritating, bilingual way. Edith and I said that it wasn't the sex so much that made our mutual agreement so exciting; it was the newness of meeting someone - that old romance was eight years old, more or less, for all of us - that was so enhancing.
'No, I think it's sex,' Severin said suddenly. 'It's just sex, and that's all it can be in a thing like this. There's nothing very romantic about hurting anybody.'
'But who's getting hurt this way?' Edith asked him. He looked at her as if there were some information between them that was too special for Utch and me to hear, but he'd said nothing to Edith before about 'hurting'. We'd all agreed that if any of us suffered for any reason from our quarternion, the relationship would end. We'd all agreed that our marriages and children had priorities. And here was Severin (feigning martyrdom?) casting his ambiguities among us as carelessly as gerbil food. We'd all agreed that the relationship was good only if it was good for all of us - if it enhanced our marriages, or at least took nothing away.
And we'd all nodded our heads - of course, of course - when, in the beginning, Severin seemed to think it was necessary to say, 'Sexual equality between two people is a difficult thing, and among four ... Well, nothing's really equal, but it has to feel pretty equal or it can't go on. I mean, if three of us are having a good time and one of us is having a bad time, then the whole thing is bad, right? And the one person who blows it all shouldn't be made to feel that it's his or her fault, right?' Yes, we had nodded.
'If you're unhappy, we should stop it,' Utch told him.
'It's not that, exactly,' he said. 'Everyone else seems so happy with it.'
'Well, it's supposed to make people happy,' Edith said.
'Yes, sex is,' Severin said.
'You call it what you
want to; I'll call it what I want to,' Edith said. He always seemed uncomfortable about her independence of him.
'Ja, I think it's just sex too,' Utch said. I was surprised at her, but then I thought that she was just trying to help him out. He was always so insistent on setting himself apart from the rest of us.
'Look, Severin, if you're unhappy, we'll stop the whole thing right now,' I said. That was his loose phrase: 'the whole thing'. I asked him, 'Are you unhappy, Severin?'
But if Severin had ever been questioned by God, he'd have found a way to evade Him. 'It's not that simple,' he said. 'I just don't want any of us getting in over our heads.' I know Edith was insulted by that. She'd already told him how much in control of herself she was.
'I think we're all pretty stable, Severin,' I said. 'Nobody's going to leave anybody, or run off with somebody else.'
'Oh, I know that,' he said. 'I don't mean anything like that.'
'Well, what do you mean?' Edith asked him; he was exasperating to her.
He shrugged her off. 'I guess I feel that I have to do the worrying for all of us,' he said, 'because no one else seems worried about anything. But let's give it time; everything takes time.' I felt angry. He seemed so insensitive - to Utch, for example. His way of reducing our relationship to 'just sex' must have hurt her feelings a little. And since he clearly behaved as if he were unhappy, I know that Utch must have had bad thoughts that it was her he was unhappy with.
Edith laughed. 'Well, we certainly don't have to worry,' she said. 'You're doing enough worrying for everyone.' I laughed; Severin smiled, but his smile was nothing I'd care to wake up to. Utch said later that she'd been angry with Edith for using a tone toward Severin that you might use toward a child, but I felt he'd deserved it. As if Severin were out of the room, Edith told us that we mustn't worry if Severin appeared unhappy sometimes. 'He's more unhappy than us, anyway,' Edith said lightly, 'and it's a mistake to think that he's unhappy because of anything. I think we're all just happier people than Severin,' she said, and looked at him - for confirmation? He'd said the same thing about himself once, but now he seemed sullen when Edith said it - as if, typically, he never took anything he said seriously, but had to believe Edith.
It was an awkward moment, and suddenly Utch had her coat on and was standing between Severin's chair and where I sat on the sofa with Edith. 'Vitch one of you is taking me home?' she asked. 'Who gets me tonight?'
Well, we all had to laugh. And I stood up, and bowed, and said to Severin, 'Please, the honor is all yours,' and he stood up and bowed and hesitated - and I thought that he might be on the verge of saying, 'Take your goddamn wife home yourself and let me have mine!'
But with a look to Edith which was mostly in fun, he said, 'Allow me to do you such a favor sometime.' And he picked Utch up in his arms, easily resting her over his shoulder, and left with her worrisome laughter dying away outdoors.
In the way Edith and I then smiled at each other, I sensed that time was not what Severin Winter needed. I think we felt conscious of him as the driver (any one of us could have asserted ourselves, too, but we didn't seem to have the need for it) - and we knew that he might choose to stop it. (Any one of us could have done that, but we felt that if anyone would stop it, it would be Severin.)
Usually Edith and I talked a long time after we were alone - about each other and about writing. I would read her some of my new work; occasionally I gave her latest things a good critique. It was often two o'clock in the morning when we'd realize the time and know that Severin would be home in an hour or so, and then we would go upstairs and always be careful not to be still making love when he returned. Usually we were asleep; he'd knock once on the bedroom door to wake us, and I'd get dressed and go home to Utch.
But that night we went to bed almost as soon as Severin took Utch home. I suppose we may have felt some anxiety that it was going to end. When I told Utch about it, she said, 'Don't try to tell me it's not sex.'
'Edith and I mean it's not just sex,' I said. 'At least not for us.' But I think that such distinctions - like self-pity and dying for freedom - were dubious to Utch. She had been brought up better than any of us, to know the difference between what you are willing to do for someone else and what you do for yourself.
4
Scouting Reports: Severin [158-pound class]
THE NEW GYM included an indoor hockey rink, three basketball courts, a swimming pool, various exercise rooms, men's and women's locker rooms, and an awful hall displaying trophies and photographs of all the old heroes. From the outside, it had the tomblike appearance characteristic of public skating arenas and modern libraries. There was considerable murmuring among the old guard that the place should have at least been made to resemble the old campus - bricks and ivy - but it was clear that ivy could never be encouraged to cling to all that slick concrete and glass. Severin Winter loved the building.
What was left of the old gym was a vast underground labyrinth of squash and handball courts, and the old locker rooms, now used by visiting teams - perhaps to depress them. This maze was connected to the new underground of shiny steel lockers and ingenious shower nozzles by a long tunnel to what was called 'the old cage'.
